Preface

In Memory of Arnold M. Cooper, M.D. An independent voice in American psychoanalysis

After ten years, forty issues, some 175 articles, eighty book reviews or review essays, nearly 100 columns, obituaries, guest prefaces, letters, bibliographies, and other miscellaneous contributions, 5,665 pages, and who knows how many words, this is my final issue as editor of American Imago.

As such, I would like to thank everyone who has made my efforts for the past decade not only possible but immeasurably fulfilling. First and foremost, this includes the authors who have honored American Imago by entrusting me with their work. I am especially grateful to those who have thanked me for the constructive criticisms I have sought to offer even when I had to decline their submissions. To anyone with whom I may have been insufficiently tactful, I sincerely apologize for my insensitivity.

Among my orchestra of published authors, I owe the greatest debt to my three "soloists," Ellen Handler Spitz, Warren S. Poland, and Brett Kahr, whose performances have astounded me by their unfailing grace and profundity.

To all those who belong to our community of readers, as well as the colleagues who answered my call by serving on the editorial board, thank you. My illustrious coeditors, Franco Borgogno, Vera J. Camden, and Louise J. Kaplan, have counseled and chastened me through the years. The vision of nine guest editors (including one duo) helped annually to shape the direction of the journal. Martin J. Gliserman took a leap of faith in inviting me to be his successor, and his foresight in bringing the journal to The Johns Hopkins University Press has paid incalculable dividends. Behind the scenes in Baltimore, William Breichner has been the most benevolent of overseers, while Mary Muhler shepherded each issue through production and unraveled every snag with utmost dexterity and professionalism. I thank the University of Florida for the support I have received, above all in the form of my three graduate assistants, Sarah M. Mallonee (2001-2004), Kristen Smith (2004-2008), and Matthew J. Snyder (2008-2011), who have done everything I asked of them and more. Gina Atkinson found the time in midcourse to come to my rescue as managing editor for our guest-edited Fall issues.

I confess to taking pride in having achieved my aim of making "every issue a special issue" by giving all forty of them a thematic focus. While retaining our valued association with Project Muse, the online presence of The Johns Hopkins University Press, we were likewise successful in securing an affiliation with Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing, thereby ensuring that everything appearing in our pages is accessible to the entire psychoanalytic community. We reached our high point of notoriety when our publication in the Winter 2006 issue of Franz Maciejewski's discovery of the 1898 Swiss hotel log where Freud signed in with his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, as his wife, led on Sunday, December 24, 2006, to a front-page story in The New York Times (Blumenthal 2006). The late Hanna Segal's charge in her contribution to the Fall 2006 issue, guest edited by Rachel Blass, that "the new model of the mind" developed by the Independent group in the British Society, "deriving from Ferenczi and developed by Winnicott, Balint, and, later in the United States, by Kohut," was "essentially non-analytic" (288-89), incited two letters of protest from colleagues in London—one with fifty signatories (McCall and Wolf et al. 2007), and the other with four (Loden et al. 2007)—which I was happy to publish two issues later. Regrettably, however, it did not appear to have been clear to some who took offense that, far from endorsing Segal's views, I was rather seeking to accord her the right to freedom of expression so that others could draw their own conclusions about what this spokeswoman for the Kleinian school had written.

I think I can also claim to have taken some strides toward my two overarching goals: using the journal to build a bridge between the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis, and to foster an integration between the cerebral hemispheres of psychoanalysis as a...